


the sea and its waters

by darlingofdots



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Abigail Pent Gets to Kick Ass, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Blood and Injury, Everybody Lives, Exorcism, Gen, GtN speedrun, Harrow the Ninth Spoilers (Locked Tomb Trilogy), The People's Tomb Fic Jam: Scream, i made it sad again i am so sorry, well except the ones who deserve it i guess
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-02
Updated: 2020-10-02
Packaged: 2021-03-07 17:01:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,858
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26781043
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/darlingofdots/pseuds/darlingofdots
Summary: 'au where Gideon wore her real sword to breakfast on like Day 2 of Canaan House because fuck Harrow amiright? and from across the dining hall Abigail Pent was like, “oh my god that sword is possessed. That sword is VERY possessed.” *walking over* “Did you know that your sword is possessed by literally THE angriest - I’m gonna talk to her. Is anyone else going to -  I’m not waiting for an answer, I’m talking to this ghost.”'I moved the timing around a bit - this takes place immediately after chapter 14 of Gideon the Ninth.
Comments: 24
Kudos: 238





	the sea and its waters

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by [this post](https://tanoraqui.tumblr.com/post/630268191787155457/au-where-gideon-wore-her-real-sword-to-breakfast) on tumblr, written with generous permission by the OP. Hope you like it, and I'm sorry.

‘I’d do a hell of a lot better with a longsword,’ Gideon had said. Harrowhark had squashed that impulse rather thoroughly, but honestly, _fuck_ Harrowhark. Gideon felt wired as though she’d stuck her hand in an electrical outlet, buzzing with a kind of energy like she hadn’t felt in all the time they’d been at Canaan House. There hadn’t been anything for her to do here, except retrieving her necromancer from bone cocoons, and now she finally had the promise of a fight to look forward to — a real fight, not a fancy duel with ridiculous rituals and ludicrous rules about not punching your opponent in the face. Making her go into that fight with that flimsy toothpick of a rapier was like… like asking a nun to pray without a rosary. Could be done, seemed stupid. (Gideon hated that this was the best comparison she could come up with.) Gideon did not think she was the best swordswoman alive, but she definitely was the best swordsperson of the Ninth House — not that that meant much — and she _missed_ her longsword. She hadn’t been parted from it for this long since, like, _ever_ , and she missed it like she had never missed anything.

When the invitation arrived and sent Harrow into a fit of agitated nerves in the manner of a small, trapped rodent, Gideon took the opportunity of Harrow doing whatever sinister rites she performed in the bathroom to crack the false bottom of her trunk and disappear from the Ninth quarters before Harrow could catch her. She didn’t go to the training room — she didn’t _totally_ want to blow her cover any more than she already had — but there were plenty of empty rooms in Canaan House that nobody ever bothered with. This one had light fixtures that didn’t work and a high ceiling that vanished into shadow, and Gideon begrudgingly admitted that it felt almost homely. She ran through her drills for a couple of hours, relishing in the comforting, familiar weight of it, the texture of the grip in her palms, the pull on her muscles as she lifted and wielded it. She hadn’t realised just how unmoored she had felt ever since they’d left Drearburh, reduced to skulking around a damp, decaying palace without her most loyal companion, until the world clicked sharply into focus again.

She didn’t go straight back to the Ninth quarters after she was done, knowing she was dragging out the inevitable shitstorm when Harrowhark Nonagesimus discovered she had disobeyed a very specific order, but rambled around the sun-soaked hallways for a while in the manner of a disgruntled revenant. She’d have to go back eventually to ditch her sweat-soaked clothes and wash up for dinner. Despite Magnus’ reassurances about the lack of formality, Gideon didn’t think his necromancer wife would appreciate her showing up with her hair plastered to her head and her robes covered in dust and cobwebs. Whenever Gideon had seen her, Lady Abigail Pent had looked distressingly _tidy_.

It was a very considerate thought which proved to be in vain when she ended up running into the Fifth anyway. Their assigned quarters must be somewhere around here and they were clearly coming from the direction of the huge and dusty library that Gideon had discounted as painfully boring as soon as she’d discovered it — Magnus the Fifth had a stack of books in his arms almost as tall as he was, and his wife had a smudge of ink on the side of her jaw, a pen stuck haphazardly behind her ear, and another in her hand with which she was intently scribbling notes on a pad of flimsy.

‘Ninth!’ Magnus called out when he spotted her, with the same bright air of cheerfulness he always seemed to conjure up to greet her. ‘What a pleasant, ah, coincidence to see you here.’

Gideon decided to try for a smile in lieu of a proper response. She wouldn’t have known what to say anyway.

‘Hope we will see you and the Reverend Daughter later tonight,’ Magnus continued. ‘It really isn’t a big to-do, but we can never resist a party.’

As someone who had never had any parties to resist before, Gideon found this understandable. Parties sounded fun, from what she’d read. She’d always wanted to go to one.

‘Magnus,’ said Abigail, who had only just looked up. She was staring at Gideon, who was immediately very aware of the six feet of steel she carried resting on her right shoulder. She resisted the sudden impulse to try and hide her sword behind her body like a naughty child caught with her spoon in the porridge pot. ‘Dear, do you see that sword?’

Magnus shifted the weight of the books in his arms. ‘I do, dear, but I wasn’t going to mention it. I get the impression that the Ninth would rather not draw attention to it. No offence, Ninth, and I won’t tell, if you’re concerned about that.’

‘That’s not — Gideon the Ninth, are you aware that that sword is quite haunted?’

Gideon’s jaw dropped open. She closed it again, her top and bottom molars clacking together so loudly it made Magnus wince.

‘I can’t really determine the specifics without getting my hands on it, of course, and I’d have to run a few tests, but goodness me, I can feel it all the way from here! That’s a powerful revenant attached to it, I’d say. I would _love_ to —’

‘Alright, dear, give her a moment,’ Magnus interrupted, still smiling, as if this was a perfectly normal conversation to be having in an empty corridor in the abandoned House of God at five o’clock in the afternoon. ‘My wife gets very excited about hauntings,’ he told Gideon with a conspiratorial air. ‘It’s her bread and butter, really, but it never does get boring.’

Abigail took two steps towards Gideon, one hand reaching out almost as if she meant to get her hands on Gideon’s sword right then and there, and Gideon took a very decided step back. The Fifth necromancer dropped her hand and ducked her head. ‘My apologies. But I really _would_ like a closer look at that, if you’re willing, maybe later? We can talk it over after dinner. You are coming, aren’t you? Only it would be a shame to miss it, I’m sure it’ll be quite fun.’

‘I did promise dessert,’ Magnus added.

Behind her spectacles, Abigail’s eyes were sparkling with excitement. ‘Do have any ideas who the spirit might be? Was the sword always yours? Did it belong to anyone before you?’

Juggling his stack of books, Magnus gave his wife a jovial jostle with his elbow. ‘Let her think about the answer before you ask another question, dear.’

Gideon, who was so out of her depth that she was probably in heights, fled.

##

It would have been optimistic to hope that Harrow wouldn’t be there when Gideon skulked back to the Ninth quarters, and Gideon was many things but when it came to the Reverend Daughter, she hadn’t been an optimist in years. She supposed she could have hidden the longsword under some of the debris that was Canaan House’s most plentiful natural resource and fetched it later, but after her encounter with the Fifth pair she wasn’t keen on letting it out of her sight. The vicious fury of Harrowhark Nonagesimus she could handle, she never went much farther than first blood; returning for her sword and finding it had disappeared while she was gone she really couldn’t.

Harrow was scribbling in her diary when Gideon ducked into the room, a thin trail of blood in the corner of her mouth from stabbing the inside of her cheek with her pen. She barely glanced up at the noise, clearly more reflex than anything else, but much like Abigail’s her gaze stuck on the weapon on Gideon’s shoulder and her pointy little face screwed up tight.

‘I guess I shouldn’t be surprised,’ Harrow said, shutting her notebook. ‘You’ve never been one to follow orders and you certainly don’t give a fig about the Ninth House, but your sword, Griddle? Really?’ She pushed away from the table.

‘Abigail Pent thinks it’s haunted,’ Gideon blurted out.

‘Pent _saw_ you? And her fool of a husband, too, I suppose, just what we needed.’ Then Harrow’s brain registered what Gideon had said. ‘Wait. She thinks it’s _haunted_?’

‘Uh, yeah? She got really excited about it too, like you when you find a funky trapezoid in the crypts.’ She wanted to say something about the Fifth cavalier not being a fool, because that was unfair, but right now that was, like, the least of her problems.

‘Hmm,’ Harrow said meditatively, then: ‘Give it here a moment.’

This time, Gideon did hide the sword behind her back like a guilty child. ‘Not a chance.’

‘I just want to look at it!’

‘You’ve never wanted to look at it. You hate my sword.’

Harrow waved an imperious hand. The bracelets of distal phalanges on her wrist rattled. ‘Give it here, Griddle.’

‘No. And you can’t take it from me, because you still have blood sweat in your hair and I reckon I can take you.’ That was only about two thirds true; the bedroom in their quarters was gigantic compared to your common or garden variety Ninth House cell, but still pretty cramped and covered in bones to boot. If Harrow wanted to crowd her with constructs, she definitely could.

The Reverend Daughter rolled her eyes so hard she probably strained something. ‘Fine! Fine. But I _will_ talk to Lady Pent about this. Go get in the sonic, Griddle, you’re disgusting.’

Two hours later, Gideon sat between the dreadful teen cavalier and a very straight-backed Palamedes Sextus, barely tasting her food, which was a shame. At least Abigail didn’t seem to take Gideon’s sudden departure from earlier personally, but Harrow had cornered her before dinner (while the Fifth necromancer had still had her apron on) and spent a full five minutes urgently whispering about something out of Gideon’s earshot, which she found ominous to the extreme. She’d very reluctantly buckled on her rapier before leaving their quarters, but she’d made Harrow wait outside in the hallway while she hid her longsword down the back of a decrepit old dresser.

Dessert had barely been cleared away — Gideon vaguely remembered sugar and cream and tiny red fruit that burst in the mouth in a sharp sour twang but she’d been too preoccupied to really taste it — when Harrowhark appeared at her shoulder so suddenly that Gideon would have jumped if she hadn’t been so used to it. ‘Come _on_ ,’ she said, wrapping her tiny hand around Gideon’s forearm. She was a bit breathless and flushed underneath her elaborate face paint, which amounted to pretty much unprecedented levels of excitement.

‘I really don’t want to overstep,’ Abigail said when Gideon reluctantly let herself be dragged over to the settee where she was perched with a cup of tea balanced delicately on her knees. ‘I’m sorry I scared you away earlier, Ninth, I just get rather excited when I encounter a haunted object in the wild, so to speak.’

‘You are certain it’s the sword?’ Harrow asked, already fiddling with her pen and notebook.

‘Quite certain, yes, because I would’ve have noticed if it were any other object on her person and it is rather a large sword, to be honest.’ She smiled, a sharp sort of smile that showed her teeth. ‘I haven’t felt that kind of resentment and animation from a revenant in a good long while, Reverend Daughter, and I would be deeply grateful if you would let me have a go at it.’

‘Only if you will let me watch,’ Harrowhark said, which was a ridiculously little thing to ask in return for a favour that Abigail clearly wanted desperately, and a bold move for someone who very much was not authorised to make any decisions about Gideon’s personal bloody belongings.

Gideon made a gruff noise to this effect. Harrow shushed her. ‘How soon could you start?’

‘If you could help scrounge up some good quality candles, and find me some clear floorspace, half an hour.’

‘Excellent. I suggest the room two doors down from the library. We shall meet you there in thirty minutes.’

‘I have patently not agreed to this, Nonagesimus,’ Gideon ground out as Harrow dragged her back to their quarters. The food she had eaten but not tasted sat leaden in her stomach. She thought she might throw up.

‘It’s just a _sword_ , Griddle.’

‘Yeah, but it’s my sword, and last I checked being your cavalier did not involve signing over my personal property to you anymore than I have already.’ Back on the Ninth, Crux loved nothing more than to remind her that everything she had and was rightfully belonged to the House until the day she had paid off her debt or, more likely, died of old age, and even then her skeleton would be put to use once it was nice and dry. Even the clothes she was wearing had belonged to Ortus.

Harrow was digging around in one of her trunks, tossing swathes of unspecific black fabric and an assortment of osseus matter onto the big canopied bed. When she finally emerged with a dozen or so skinny candles, she kissed her teeth at her cavalier. ‘If that ghastly thing is as haunted as Lady Pent thinks it is, we’ll be better off without it.’

‘How do you know she’s right? I’ve had that sword for _years.’_

‘Yes,’ Harrow said primly, wrapping the candles in a spare veil. ‘And I’ve never liked it, as you well know, and it seems we will finally know the reason why. You’ll still have the rapier, which is a much more appropriate weapon, which you should also know.’

Unsurprisingly, Harrow was completely missing the point. Or maybe she wasn’t, and she just didn’t care. ‘I don’t fucking care about appropriate.’

One of those stupid painted eyebrows rose half an inch. ‘That much is plain.’

Gideon’s hands were shaking. She desperately wanted to punch something and if she wasn’t very careful, that something was going to be her necromancer. She planted her feet and balled her fists at her sides. Then Harrow did something so awful it sent actual fucking shudders down her spine: she put a hand on Gideon’s arm, in a manner that suggested she had been aiming for her shoulder but couldn’t quite reach, and was meant to be clumsily reassuring. ‘Griddle,’ she said, ‘I will get you a new sword.’

Gideon shook her off. ‘Sure you will.’

‘I swear by that which lies insensate in the tomb,’ Harrow intoned with the flat, emotionless voice she used when she led services, ‘that if you let Lady Pent do whatever she must to exorcise the spirit that haunts your sword, I shall do everything in my power to procure a new one for you. Satisfied?’

Not by half, but she didn’t know what else to do. If she kept resisting, Harrow might genuinely decide to force her or, worse, pretend to be nice about it, and Gideon definitely couldn’t deal with that. She retrieved her sword from behind the dresser, shouldered it, and followed her necromancer out of the room.

##

Abigail had been busy while they were arguing. When they got to the room Harrow had suggested, what sparse furniture there was had been pushed unceremoniously to the walls, except for a low table at the very centre into which the Fifth House necromancer had already carved a complicated diagram. She was still on her knees, scratching at the floorboards with a sharp-looking tool that seemed to have been made for the purpose. Her clothes were the same as she had worn to dinner, but she had tied up her sleek brown hair in a bun at the back of her head and removed the little gold earrings she had worn earlier.

‘I hope you don’t mind, but the Master Warden will be joining us shortly,’ she said when she heard them approach. ‘He overheard me telling Magnus and asked if he might watch, too.’

The sour expression that passed across Harrow’s face showed that she clearly did mind but she said nothing, just presented her parcel of candles. Abigail took them with an appraising eye.

‘Human tallow,’ she said, ‘very good for summonings. You’ll each need a ghost ward on you, my husband has the diagrams, and if you could place the object on the table, Ninth, we can get started just as soon as I finish the circle.’

Magnus the Fifth held up the sheet of flimsy so Harrow could copy the wards down and Gideon grudgingly presented her palms to be scratched. The Reverend Daughter did her own wards with the blunt end of a needle, biting her bottom lip in furious concentration, then went to help position the candles in a circle around the so far conspicuously vacant table.

‘I wasn’t going to ask,’ Magnus said, ‘just to preserve the shreds of my dignity that you left me with after our duel, you know, but I take it the rapier is _not_ your main weapon?’

What would be the point in denying it? Gideon shook her head.

‘Ah. Well. You certainly gave me what-for well enough either way.’

It was then that the Sixth House pair walked in, still in the slightly more starched greys they had been to dinner in but Camilla the Sixth had an overstuffed satchel slung over her shoulder and Palamedes Sextus had two different notebooks under his arm. He gave Gideon a friendly nod and headed straight towards where Abigail and Harrow were on their knees, completing the circle, while Camilla came to stand in the corner of the room that was apparently reserved for cavaliers and looked Gideon’s sword over from point to pommel, one eyebrow minutely quirked.

‘Nice sword,’ she said. ‘Shame it’s haunted.’

Gideon scowled at her and tightened her grip on the hilt.

‘Still not talking, I see.’

Sticking her tongue out at the Sixth cavalier was probably too juvenile even for Gideon, so she didn’t. She wasn’t sure _why_ she hadn’t broken her ridiculous fake vow of silence yet, except that Harrow would be extremely annoyed about it and she was already in a weird-ass mood. Also, if she opened her mouth she was going to either violently throw up or scream, and she wasn’t sure which was worse.

Thankfully, Abigail called out to her before she could do either. ‘Just on the table please, dear, thank you.’

Gideon wasn’t used to people saying ‘please’ or ‘thank you’, and nobody had ever called her a ‘dear’ in her entire life. She picked her way across the diagrams on the floorboards, careful not to smudge any because that seemed like the sort of thing necromancers would get angry about, and gently (and with great reluctance) lay her beloved longsword at the centre of the summoning circle like it was the most precious, delicate thing she had ever beheld. Her heart gave a great _pang_ as she walked back to the corner of the room, and Magnus patted her back in a sort of generally supportive manner.

The necromancers — and Camilla, for some reason — had immediately congregated around the sword like vultures swooping in on a dying beast. None of them touched it, but Palamedes Sextus had bent over it so far that his breath must be fogging up the polished steel and Abigail Pent was rubbing her hands together with way too much excitement.

‘What can you tell me about this object, Reverend Daughter?’ she asked, retrieving a pen from behind her ear.

Harrow shrugged. ‘I know almost nothing about it. The captain of my guard petitioned to give it to Gideon from the Drearburh stock. I signed the order. The box was still wrapped.’ She added, in a very small voice and with more actual emotion than Gideon had ever known her to express in public: ‘I hated that damned sword for years. I don’t know why; it just felt strange — rancorous.’ She pressed her lips together suddenly, as if she’d almost said more but stopped herself, and her eyes flicked in Gideon’s direction for a fraction of a second.

Camilla, who was leaning in close to the sword and probably would have overbalanced if it weren’t for Palamedes’ arm around her middle, said: ‘It’s a standard-issue infantry sword, maybe thirty years old. Two-hander, has seen heavy use, very well maintained.’

Abigail was scribbling something in her notes. ‘But do you truly have no idea who might be haunting it? An unhappy dead relative perhaps?’

Next to her, Harrow went stiff. She had taken down her veil to copy the wards and not pinned it back up so her face was clearly visible — below her thick layer of paint, but still — and Gideon didn’t know she’d lurched forward until a hand on her arm held her back.

Abigail said, ‘Oh, well, I’m sure I’ve done worse with less. Right, Master Warden, Camilla the Sixth, you need to get your wards done, and I need something to tempt this ghost with. I’ll use some of my own blood, and… yes, as this is the Ninth’s sword I suppose it makes the most sense —’

Gideon submitted to Camilla drawing a vial full of blood from the crook of her left elbow under Harrow’s watchful eye, probably making sure she didn’t decide to rebel at the last minute and run off. The Ninth necromancer hadn’t properly relaxed after Abigail’s question about dead relatives and her thin mouth was even more sour and pinched than usual.

‘Alright, let’s get this party started,’ Abigail said, pouring Gideon’s blood into a jug and swirling it around a few times to mix it with her own. She rubbed her ungloved hands together, evidently enjoying herself immensely. ‘Reverend Daughter, you and your cavalier by the door, please, and the Sixth on the opposite side. I hope there won’t be any fighting but you never know with these things and it’s best to be prepared. Magnus —’

But her husband was already at her side, holding out his hands, and she grasped them with her own and leant in to kiss him, briefly, on the lips before they both crossed to the perimeter of the circle together, careful not to scuff any of the marks on the floorboards. Magnus stood half a step behind his wife, his hand on the hilt of his rapier, his stance neater and more alert than Gideon had ever seen in the training room. Gideon surreptitiously shuffled back to mirror him, reluctantly glad that Harrow had made her buckle on her own rapier before they left. Harrow had removed the bone studs from her ears and unclipped the bracelets from her wrists to cradle them in her upturned palms, ready to be flung into the air and turned into full skeleton constructs before they hit the floor. Opposite them, Camilla the Sixth looked extremely unhappy behind her necromancer.

Abigail Pent gave the jug of blood a last, meditative swirl then stepped forward. ‘Here’s the libation, for what good it may do,’ she said, and poured a measure of blood at the foot of the table where Gideon’s longsword was laid out like an animal to be ritually sacrificed.

‘You come in fury,’ Abigail said, and spilt another runnel.

‘You come alone,’ she said, and spilt another.

‘You come to a sword of the Ninth House,’ she said, and another.

‘This is all we know,’ she said, and upended the jug, and shook out the last pale drops. ‘This is all we know, you helpless ghost, whither did you come? I am a spirit-caller of the House of the Fifth. I am Abigail for my mothers, Pent for my people. I call to you with old blood and new, with the power that runs through my veins and the veins of my ancestors. I bid you reveal yourself, discarnate revenant, so that I may sever the thanergetic link and return you to the River from whence you came and where you rightfully belong.’ With that, she placed both hands on the sword, palms down, and a cold blue light emanated from beneath those hands, as though the blade itself had come alight.

Nothing else happened. The room was utterly silent. Gideon did not dare breathe.

‘Well,’ Abigail said, and blew a stray hair out of her face. ‘Someone’s stubborn. Let’s give a good, hard pulls and see what emerges.’

The candles flared. Where before they had burned with a meek yellow flame, now they burned as strong and blue as the spirit-magic emanation from Abigail’s hands.

Abigail asked: ‘Who _are_ you?’

An unholy noise arose from the sword, a cacophony of screams and the heavy impact of steel on steel and the roar of a shuttle engine, and a voice above it all: ‘Gideon! Gideon! Gideon!’

At her post outside the circle, Gideon felt herself go white. Everyone but Abigail and Harrow stared at her; Abigail kept her eyes firmly fixed on the sword beneath her hands, and Harrow had only flung an arm back to keep Gideon in her place.

The Fifth necromancer repeated herself, more firmly: ‘I bid you reveal yourself!’

And then all hell broke loose.

The figure that emerged from Gideon’s sword wore a ragged orange haz-suit, the dark mask gleaming dully in the candlelight. It appeared like a flash of lightning, arms flung out in Gideon’s direction. In a voice that sounded like the crack of thunder, but not inhuman, it screeched: ‘You! You wretched lump of cells, you misuse of oxygen, you unholy fucking affliction! How dare you _waste_ your blood, how dare you live in their service, how dare you not die when you were meant to die!’

Harrowhark Nonagesimus tipped her chin up. ‘I don’t think I much like your tone.’

##

Later — much later, Gideon sat in the rubble of Canaan House, dazed and hurt and furious and empty all at once. The mangled body of the Lyctor who had pretended to be Dulcinea Septimus lay at her feet. Gideon’s rapier was still protruding from where she had run her through, swaying slightly in the wind. The thought of pulling it out had, after a night in which one horror had chased the next, been too much for her to handle. She had already retched up the entirety of her stomach contents and more and now she was just… empty.

A few metres away, Camilla the Sixth sat on the remains of a toppled stone column while her necromancer fretted over her wounds; the shoulder looked bad, but Camilla had only screamed the once when Gideon had torn the spike of bone out of her and gone silent as the grave as soon as Palamedes was within earshot, which was hardcore as fuck. Magnus was crouched low where he had finally forced his wife to sit down, still crackling with blue fire that made the ends of her hair stand up and had burnt away ten inches of her sleeves, a wild, slightly mad look in her eyes.

Gideon would have liked to move. She would have liked to get up and walk away and keep walking until there was nowhere left to walk, and then she would have liked to scream until her throat bled and her lungs gave out, but she couldn’t. Her knee was thoroughly fucked, and she’d lost a lot of blood. All she could do was sit there, surveying the carnage, and feel empty.

Harrowhark dropped to her knees next to her. ‘ _Griddle_.’

She blinked at her necromancer. She looked like shit; blood sweat running down her face in pink rivulets, smearing her paint, chips of bone stuck in her hair. ‘You look like shit,’ Gideon said, intelligently, then yelped when Harrow put her cold bony hands on her torn-up leg.

‘Your patella’s shot,’ Harrow said. ‘Dear God, I think she split your humerus. Sextus —’

The next ten minutes were the not the worst ten minutes of Gideon’s life, but they came close. Magnus and Camilla had to hold her still while Harrow and Palamedes knitted her back together, the _crunch_ of her splintered kneecap melting back into shape inside her reverberating through her entire leg like ten million insects sinking their venomous jaws into her very nerves — and then it was over, and she slumped backwards into the pile of cracked tiles and crumbled fountain and stared up at the scorched ceiling. She closed her eyes. She could still her the voice of the revenant (her mother’s voice, her brain reminded her) screaming at her from beyond the grave that she was an abomination, that she had only ever been conceived to die, to kill…

Something touched her hand. Her eyes flew open and she lifted her head, ready to jump back to her feet, but it was just Harrow. Gideon thought that if she apologised, she would die. But Harrow said nothing, just covered Gideon’s hand with hers.

**Author's Note:**

> The title is from [this song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3wFZfpMQmM) by The Amazing Devil. The next line is 'every unwanted daughter'.
> 
> Huge shoutout to the OP on tumblr for coming up with that absolute galaxy brain of a concept and also very kindly letting me take a stab at it, and also to the folks on the discord for cheering me on, y'all are the best. Once again, I apologise.


End file.
